Course Descriptions
COMP LIT 200 – Intro to Literary Theory
This course offers an introduction to key works of criticism and major theories for the study of literature. We will ask questions at the very heart of literary studies: what is literature? What are its uses? How does it employ form to address matters of experience and society? And how are the literatures of the world related across differences of culture, language, history, geography, and media? We will survey debates about these questions in the criticism of the past as well as in recent, cutting-edge theory. We will emphasize the rewards of learning to read critically in relation to social dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality. We will develop new eyes and ears as readers, looking and listening close-up at the narrative, poetic and dramatic features of literary texts, as well as zooming out to compare larger patterns of cultural representation across time and space. This course serves as an introduction to the major in Comparative Literary Studies, but it is open to all students who are sincere in their enthusiasm and serious in their curiosity about the nature of literary expression.
COMP LIT 201 – Reading World Literature, “Global Spaces of the Novel”
"You build bridges across difference to arrive at the universal through describing the
particular." - Garth Greenwell
Can we think of global novels or a global aesthetic of the novel? Are there movements within the genre of the novel across cultures that can speak to a global sense of the self? As we watch nationalism and a kind of isolationism rise, what does literature offer in charting a common humanity? Are there common tropes such as violence (gender/sexual/wars etc.), or class and political struggles, love and romance, relationships, or a struggle with the dialectics of self and place? Is the novel uniquely situated to explore this because of its inherent dialogic nature, as Bakhtin says? What are the restrictions to the global self in literature - linguistic, economic, access etc.? Of course, to fully explore these would require a monumental reading list and a yearlong conversation, but we can attempt a scaled down dialogue with a reading list, that while not representative in any way of the globe, can provide a diverse base to begin from. The class is part seminar part lecture and all fun, although fair warning - some of these books are challenging in form, style, and content.
COMP LIT 202-0-20 – Interpreting Culture, “Dante’s Divine Comedy”
An introduction to Dante's masterwork on human error, punishment and redemption through a careful reading of the Inferno.
COMP LIT 202-0-20 – Interpreting Culture, “Doctor Zhivago in Cultural and Historical Context”
This course is designed as a following sequence to SLAV211-1, a general survey of early 20c. Russian Literature, focused on the interconnections between new ideas in culture and politics. It explores in detail the legendary novel Doctor Zhivago (1957), written by the Noble Laureate Boris Pasternak. This major literary work is discussed in the broad Russian and European cultural and historical context of the Cold War era, and we will follow and compare the paths of literary heroes and their real-life prototypes: Pasternak himself and his long-time companion Olga Ivinskaya. Doctor Zhivago was harshly criticized and censored in Soviet Union, then smuggled to the West with the help of the CIA to be preserved and published for the first time, finally becoming a world literary sensation and winning the Nobel Prize. Through the tumultuous publication history of this manuscript, students can gain a foundational knowledge of the history of the Soviet Union, and an understanding of the changes in the literary climate throughout the history of Soviet Russia.
COMP LIT 202-0-21 – Interpreting Culture, “Intro to Russian 20th C Literature”
This course focuses on interconnections between new ideas in literature, culture and politics in the early 20th century. Texts include great Modernist novels Peterburg (1913) by Andrei Bely, Master and Margarita (1940) by Mikhail Bulgakov, and Evgeny Zamiatin's We (1921); poetry by Aleksandr Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Mandelstam. These major works are discussed in the broad Russian and European cultural and historical context.
COMP LIT 202 – Literature of Existentialism
This course, taught in English, will serve as an introduction to existentialism, which not only defined the literary, philosophical and political culture for French intellectuals of the post-war period, but also remain indispensable for an understanding of various currents of contemporary literature and culture. We shall begin by discussing the philosophical and literary foundations of existentialism. Then we will examine the moral, social and political questions central to existentialism, as worked out in the fiction, drama, and essays of such authors as Sartre, Beauvoir, Beckett, and Fanon. Finally, we will consider the extent to hich
post-existentialist thought and culture may be read as a continuation of or as a reaction against xistentialism
COMP LIT 205 – Feminist Theory & Media in S. Asia
This course will introduce students to the ways in which South Asian (dominantly Indian, but also Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and diasporic) feminist intellectuals, artists, and activists help to shape the global discourse of feminism. After an introduction to the major contours of South Asian feminist discourse and artistic and activist practice, we will pay special attention to modern and contemporary media forms (film, web serials, blogs, journalism etc.) in South Asia that bring a feminist perspective to myriad social issues (gender identity, sexuality, caste, classed labor etc.). Students will also collaborate on critical multimedia media projects of their own
COMP LIT 207 – Intro to Critical Theory
In this class, we will focus on the foundations of critical theory in the works of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Freud, paying particular attention paid to methods they devise and deploy in their treatment of moral and religious phenomena. Lectures will primarily involve a close analysis and discussion of the readings.
COMP LIT 210 – The Bible as Literature
This course is intended to familiarize literature students with the most influential text in Western culture. No previous acquaintance with the Bible is presupposed. We will consider such questions as the variety of literary genres and strategies in the Bible; the historical situation of its writers; the representation of God as a literary character; recurrent images and themes; the Bible as a Hebrew national epic; the New Testament as a radical reinterpretation of the "Old Testament" (or Hebrew Bible); and the overall narrative as a plot with beginning, middle, and end. Since time will not permit a complete reading, we will concentrate on those books that display the greatest literary interest or influence. From the Torah we will read Genesis, Exodus, and parts of Deuteronomy; from the Prophets, Amos, Jonah, Second Isaiah, and Daniel; and from the Writings, the books of Judges, Ruth, Psalms, and the Song of Songs, along with the saga of King David and portions of the Wisdom literature. In the New Testament, we will read the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke, and John and the book of Revelation. We'll look more briefly at issues of translation; traditional strategies of interpretation, such as midrash and allegory; and the historical processes involved in constructing the Biblical canon.
COMP LIT 211 – Topics in Genre, “Intro to Premodern Chinese Poetry”
This course offers an introduction to the main forms, genres, texts and authors of Chinese poetry from the earliest period up through the end of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the so-called golden age of Chinese lyric poetry. It explores not only how Chinese poetry was written, but also why it was considered one of the most important literary forms in pre-modern China. Poetry was far more than simply a form of expression during this period. It also served as a powerful social lubricant, a mode of moral instruction, a key topic in the civil service examination and a means of transcending the very bounds of time and space. Rather than offering a strict chronological account, this class is designed around three "alternative histories" that explore the development of Chinese poetry through: 1) goddesses, shamans and the poetry of desire; 2) space and the poetry of nature; and 3) homesickness and the poetry of travel. There are no pre-requisites for this class. All readings will be in English translation, though original classical Chinese versions for some of the material will also be available.
COMP LIT 279-20 – Modern Jewish Lit in Translation
This class will read and discuss selected works of modern Jewish literature in the context of their historical background. We will focus on certain themes and stories in the Bible and in Jewish folklore as well as on particular events and movements in European, American, and Israeli history as a way of better understanding this literature. Though most of this literature dates from the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries up until the present, a study of eighteenth and nineteenth century intellectual and religious currents such as the Enlightenment, Jewish Mysticism, Zionism, and Socialism will help us to understand the literature in its changing historical and social context. Thus while some writers saw modern Jewish literature as a means of educating the masses to modern secular needs, others saw it as a means of reshaping older forms and religious values, while still others saw it as a means of reflecting timeless humanistic concerns. Among the writers we will read are Sholom Aleichem, I. B. Singer, Anzia Yezierska, Primo Levi, Ida Fink, Ava Schieber, Philip Roth, Amos Oz and Shani Boianjiu.
COMP LIT 279-21 – Literary Images of the Shtetl
In collective memory the shtetl (small Jewish town) has become enshrined as the symbolic space par excellence of close-knit, Jewish community in Eastern Europe; it is against the backdrop of this idealized shtetl that the international blockbuster Fiddler on the Roof is enacted. The shtetl is the central locus and focus of Modern Yiddish Literature; Fiddler on the Roof itself was based on a Sholem Aleichem story. In this seminar we shall explore the spectrum of representations of the shtetl in Yiddish literature from the nineteenth century to the post-Holocaust period. We shall also focus on artistic and photographic depictions of the shtetl: Chagall and Roman Vishniac in particular. The course will include a screening of Fiddler on the Roof followed by a discussion of this film based upon a comparison with the text upon which it is based, Tevye the Milkman.
COMP LIT 301 – Practices of Reading, “Contemporary Theory & Homer’s Odyssey”
Ever since Plato, philosophers and linguists have developed theories about, for instance, how language works; the respective role of authors, texts, and readers in the construction of literary meaning; and the relations between literature and history. How may that rich and diverse body of theoretical works help us develop more sophisticated readings of ancient texts? This course offers an introduction to contemporary approaches to literature including structuralism and post-structuralism, reader-response theory, Marxism, and feminism, in dialogue with Emily Wilson's 2018 translation of Homer's Odyssey. We will explore the various ways in which scholarly interpretations of Homer's Odyssey have engaged with and sometimes re-defined contemporary theory, and we will draw on those analytical tools to produce our own readings of the epic.
COMP LIT 301 – Resisting Interpretation
Literature always resists -- even as it demands -- interpretation. In certain texts of modern literature, the resistance to interpretation issues into a particularly violent struggle in which points of defiance are difficult to distinguish from moments of defeat. This class will examine some of the literary texts of modernity and the tendency of these texts toward two interpretive gestures or situations: incomprehensible self-closure (and the attendant contraction of a space for self-legitimation) and an equally incomprehensible self-expansiveness (and the exhilarating, scary freedom it entails). We will begin the course with the enigmatic words of resistance repeated by Melville's odd scrivener, Bartleby ("I prefer not to"), and end with the apocalyptic conclusion to Ellison's Invisible Man ("Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?").
COMP LIT 303 – Literary Movements, “Epic in Cross-Cultural Contexts”
In our time of Snapchat and Twitter, the term epic has entered the urban dictionary. As the genre of "heroic song," though, one way it defines itself, epic predates even the invention of writing, so that epic is perhaps the oldest continuing form of poetic production. What has allowed such epic success? The persistence of epic through cultural and linguistic change is one of the form's central themes: how can words heroically uttered and deed heroically dared be passed on from one lifetime to those that follow? How are they transformed? What does it mean to take up as one's own something that has been passed down from a culture no longer present? Such questions become even more pressing in moments when one culture encounters another and is asked in its new context what to retain, what to adopt, and what to invent. In this course we will consider how epic narrative projects, recalls, and reworks its history as tradition?literally as what is handed over?and follow several examples of epic through their cross-cultural contexts. We will survey four thousand years of epic poetry, at least glancing at works from Indic, Irish, Germanic, and Finnish traditions. The bulk of our time, though, will go to reading and analyzing Homer's Iliad, Vergil's Aeneid, The Song of Roland, Camões' Lusiads, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Wolcott's Omeros.
COMP LIT 304-0-20 – Studies in Theme, “Natural Languages & Green Worlds”
Utopia, anarchy, pastoral idyll: how have myths of a "green world" spurred us to think that language can sometimes be natural ? or that it can be precisely what separates us from "Nature"? How do our ideas about language impose distinct worlds, with distinct rules, on humans, animals, and the worlds around them? Learning about theories of culture and language alongside literary forms from the pastoral of
Shakespearean comedy to Romantic and recent poetry, from ethnographic fieldwork and nature writing to the outlandish imaginary of science fiction, students in this course unearth the unexamined grounds of "green" thought as it appears in literary environments (and as it finds other forms in film, mass media, and the popular imagination). The course will give students a critical introduction to new ideas in what is now being called the "environmental humanities," while offering a broad background on classic literary themes of wilderness, innocence, knowledge, and freedom.
COMP LIT 305-0-20 – World Cinemas, “Time, History, Film”
Chris Marker (1921-2012) was one of France's major filmmakers, but his work goes far
beyond the territories familiar to conventional ideas of "French" or even "film." To study Marker is to study the twentieth century and how it has been, or might some day be, remembered. A global traveler
disrespecting the boundaries of documentary, essay, and fiction, Marker photographed and filmed the people, places, and political events of France, Guinea-Bissau, Israel, Cuba, Japan, Siberia, and Chile (to name just a few). But he is perhaps best known for his explorations of time and memory, from his early time-travel classic La jetée (an inspiration for Twelve Monkeys, Inception, and numerous other films) through his complex histories of the Russian Revolution, Japan's Asia-Pacific War, or 1960s leftism. Marker recorded an astonishing variety of places and times, but always with an acute sense of the ways in which places and times are fictions, fictions often crafted and revised by the very ways in which they are "recorded." Accordingly, he constantly changed the media in which he worked, moving from journalism to photography, film, video, digital video, CDROM, even Second Life worlds, often reediting and reworking material, whether his own, obscure found footage, or classic Hollywood films. This course offers an introduction to Marker's cinematic work as a way to explore the experience of travel, the uncertainty of personal and historical memory, and the role of visual media in modern life and politics. We will also watch a number of related films from Alfred Hitchcock, the Soviet avant-garde, early cinema vérité, and the French New Wave (with which Marker was affiliated).
COMP LIT 305-0-21 – World Cinemas, “Italian Film and Transnational Cinema”
The film movement known as Italian Neorealism has changed the way in which we understand cinema and its relationship to reality. It has produced masterpieces such as Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1947) and inspired generations of filmmakers in countries as diverse as Brazil, France, India, Iran, Senegal, and the United States. This course will explore the history of Neorealism and its aftermath from a global, transnational perspective. Neorealism was soon marked as "Italian" and yet its origins and influence go well beyond the boundaries of a single nation, one of the aims
of this course will be to assess the role that diversity and plurality have played in shaping the forms and themes of Neorealist cinema and its aftermath. While drawing from the field of cinema and media studies, we will analyze films by renowned directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Abbas Kiarostami, Glauber Rocha, and Martin Scorsese, among others.
COMP LIT 312-0-20 – Authors and Their Readers, “Proust”
This course will be devoted to an intense engagement with one of the major figures in the
history of literature, Marcel Proust, and to his In Search of Lost Time, which remains a crucial text in the
development of modern thought. The focus will be on four volumes of the Search: Swann's Way, Within a
Budding Grove, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Time Regained. We will explore Proust's reinvention of the novel
as a form in relation to a number of Proustian problems and themes: his analyses of desire, perversion and
sexuality; his reflections on the nature of time and memory; and his exploration of the relationship of art to
life. We will also consider Proust's powers as a satirist and critic of ideology, who mercilessly dismantled the individual and collective illusions of his contemporaries.
COMP LIT 312-0-21 – Texts and Contexts, “Art of Rabbinic Narrative”
Rabbinic literature contains a large corpus of stories. In this course we will explore different methods of reading such stories. These range from naïve historiography to sophisticated historiography, from reading these stories as fables with didactic morals to reading them as windows onto a class-stratified and gender-divided rabbinic culture. Our analysis of these methods of reading rabbinic stories will be conducted in conversation with different twentieth century literary theorists.
COMP LIT 312-0-21 – Authors and Their Readers, “Kafka: The Question of the Narrator”
This seminar will be meant both as an introduction to Kafka's writings, especially the shorter fiction. The guiding thread will be the question of the narrator and the role the narrative plays in his work. This may seem obvious, but much Kafka criticism avoids this question either by equating the narrator with the author and focusing on "Kafka," or by regarding the narrative as a means of representing whatever is narrated and focusing on the objects represented. By contrast I want to argue that very often, if not always, the most interesting aspect of his writings is concentrated on the ambiguous figure and discourse of the narrator and the narrative, which doesn't simply tell a story that exists independently of it but that tells us something about the process of story-telling and the different "figures" that are involved in it. In short, Kafka's writings reflect on what they are doing and this reflection makes up a decisive part of their interest. Stories that will be read include: Cares of a Family Man, The Hunter Gracchus, Josefine: Songstress of the Mice People, Before the Law, Building the Great Wall of China, The Problem of the Laws, A Report to the Academy, Up in the Gallery ? among others. Depending on time and interest, some critical texts will be discussed as well, including by Maurice Blanchot ("The Silence of the Sirens"), Jacques Derrida, "Before the Law," Coetzee (on "The Burrow") and Walter Benjamin.
COMP LIT 312 – Blake’s Afterlives: Poetics Beyond the Page
How did the Romantic poetry and visual art of William Blake come to inspire later artistic
misfits and countercultures? How has his example pushed poetics beyond the page? This course explores the unique poetry of Blake alongside its experimental, politically committed, sometimes hallucinogenic afterlives.
Obscure and barely read during his own life, the eccentric Blake might be seen as the prototype of the artistic genius ahead of his or her time, but today we can safely say that his star has risen many times over: in poetry, from the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, to Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, and Allen Ginsburg; and across the arts, from Diane Arbus (in photography) to Jackson Pollack (in painting), Patti Smith (in music), and Kenzaburo Oe (in fiction), Blake's afterlives have proliferated in the 20th century, spanning aesthetic ideologies from the Beat poets to surrealism, abstract expressionism, anti-war art, and punk. Emphasis will be placed on the poetic inventiveness of Blake's mixed-media forms, and his attempts to reinvent the literary object, as we compare his own illuminated poetry and innovative printing techniques with successors, across artistic media. The course is run in parallel with the Block Museum of Art's exhibit, "William Blake and the Age of Aquarius"; a number of our classes and assignments will focus on works displayed and events held in conjunction with this exhibit.
COMP LIT 312 – Calvino’s Fantastic World Literature
Easily the most famous Italian writer of the twentieth century, Italo Calvino’s mature, fabulist narratives advanced a cosmopolitan ideal of literature. His creative oeuvre opened new worlds because of his taste for literary and ethical adventures and nimble, luminous style. At the beginning of his career, Calvino resisted the appeal of literary realism and neorealism and invented an idiosyncratic new genre of whimsically comic science fiction in Cosmicomics. He also was a restless traveler, who wrote extensively about his journeys through the USA, Russia, Japan, etc., and eventually joined the international literary group known as Oulipo, whose members were vocal proponents of the notion of literature as a game. Starting in the 1970s, he became a firm believer in the promise of world literature, which resulted in Invisible Cities, Calvino’s rewriting of Marco Polo’s accounts of his travels through China. In his “hypernovel,” If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Calvino created a sort of imaginary index of world literatures, playfully deploying globe-trotting characters who undertake a worldwide quest through a shifting landscape of literary genres. Finally, in his celebrated Charles Norton Lectures for Harvard University, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he articulates for his readers the fundamental values of the world literatures that still are to come: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. In response, we may well ask: what is the geopolitical map on which Calvino’s imaginary explorations unfold? To what extent do Calvino’s writings create new possibilities for redefining the very concept of world literature? (Note: This class is taught in English.)
COMP LIT 312 – Authors and Their Readers, “Nietzsche: Eternal Return & Will to Power”
The class will consist of three parts: First, a brief résumé of Nietzsche's conception of language and rhetoric; second, a discussion of his conception of "The Eternal Return?"; and finally an interpretation of his efforts to think "The Will to Power". In addition to reading the relevant texts by Nietzsche, attention will be paid to Heidegger's discussion of the Will to Power in the first volume of his twovolume study of Nietzsche. Purpose of the course will be to illuminate the three different directions of Nietzsche's thought - language, eternal return, will to power, by focusing on their mutual interdependence, and above all, on the way his practice of writing provides the indispensable context for understanding the concepts it articulates. The literary dimension of Nietzsche's writing - evident in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but prevalent throughout - consists in the prioirity of the "how" of his writing over the "what" of its "content". The class will consist of lectures and discussion, involving short student reports and a longer 15 page term paper.
COMP LIT 313-0-20 – Texts and Contexts, “Caste in Indian Society & Literature”
In this class, we will focus on caste and social hierarchy in India from classical Hindu religious and legal literature to contemporary political and cultural movements, with a specific focus on anticaste Dalit (Untouchable) literature (poetry, fiction, and autobiography). We will pay special attention to the way in which caste is imagined, maintained, and defied, and seek to understand how various people articulate
the lived experience of caste in diverse cultural and aesthetic forms.
COMP LIT 313-0-20 – Texts and Contexts, “Queering Medieval Romance”
Medieval romance famously celebrated "courtly love", the ennobling passion of an aristocratic man for an upper-class woman. But just as deeply ingrained is the ideal of same-sex love between men. And despite, or perhaps because of, the Church's misogynist bias, the culture shows a surprising openness to transgender phenomena. This class will explore two kinds of texts: those in which women masquerade as men, and those in which heterosexual love disrupts or is disrupted by the bonds of male affection. Texts will include Ovid's tale of Iphis and Ianthe, in which two girls fall in love and marry; a pair of transgender saints' lives; and the stunningly postmodern romance of Silence. After our study of ambiguous gender identities, we'll turn to ambiguous desires, reading The Romance of the Rose, Amis and Amiloun, and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. We'll end with Chaucer's "other masterpiece," the magnificent Troilus and
Criseyde. Set in ancient Troy, this romance features the bisexual Pandarus, who seems to be in love with both the hero and the heroine. Amis and Amiloun and Troilus and Criseyde will be read in Middle English, the other texts in translation.
COMP LIT 375-0-20 – Literature and its Others, “Shakespeare and Music”
This course offers students the opportunity to explore some of the many intersections between Shakespearean drama and music from the late sixteenth century through the early twenty-first, not only in many sorts of performance of the plays themselves, but also in opera, ballet, film, musical theatre, artsong, popular music, and the symphony, to name only a few. Textual languages include not only The Bard's original English and its more modern forms, but also French, Italian, Japanese, and Russian for starters. Given the character and complexity of the material, and the multimedia and interdisciplinary natures of Shakespeare-inspired musical works and scholarship, this course is open to students whose primary interest or field of study is comparative literature, film, English, performance studies, or theatre, as well as any area of music. Because the original productions of all of Shakespeare's plays included music, and each one has inspired many musical interpretations since that time, we will concentrate on three. Students will have the opportunity to work with other plays for research and/or performance projects. It is hoped that the diverse backgrounds and perspectives that inform class discussion in this venue can further inspire unique collaborative and cross-disciplinary work long after the quarter is over.
COMP LIT 390-0-20 – Topics in Comparative Literature, “On Debt”
This course will be taught by the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor, Rocio Zambrana.
Debt is a social relation. It has received cosmological, theological, and economic articulation for centuries. Yet, at its core, debt is a form of social binding, hence a social bond. This course will examine debt as an economic, social, and historical relation in order to consider its critical function, thereby exploring the very idea of a critique of debt. We will read texts by Nietzsche, Marcel Mauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, David Graeber, Maurizio Lazzarato, Eletra Stimilli, among others. We will also consider ancient and contemporary articulations of debt forgiveness, relief, or cancellation (as articulated, for example, by Strike Debt or the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt). This will give us an opportunity to refer to cases of debt in Latin American and the Caribbean.
COMP LIT 390-0-21 – Topics in Comparative Literature, “Post-Revolutionary Iranian Female Writers”
This course examines literary works by Iranian women writers after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. We will investigate how these writers define gender and femininity in literature after the revolution and during crucial moments of the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. The Islamic Republic of Iran implemented changes that influenced the role of women in both social spaces and their private lives. We will examine how authors employed their characters to speak out about women's pre-existing and emerging
needs and desires during the Islamization of society after the revolution. This objective is pursued
simultaneously via close readings of fictions (and some Iranian films) which pay close attention to the situation of Iranian women after the revolution. The syllabus will incorporate methodological and theoretical readings about gender and sexuality in Iran from the early modern period to the contemporary moment.
COMP LIT 390-20 – Oceanic Studies: Literature, Environment, and History
This course offers an overview to the interdisciplinary field of "oceanic studies," focusing on the great literary, scientific, and cinematic documents of modern seafaring. Writers may include Columbus, Cook, Darwin, Coleridge, Dana, Melville, Conrad, Woolf, O'Neill, Joji, Traven, Mutis, and/or Goldman. How have seas, sailors, ships and their cargoes helped to shape our imagination and understanding of major events and processes of modernity, such as the discovery of the New World, slavery, industrial capitalism, marine science, the birth of environmental consciousness, and contemporary globalization? What part did seafaring play in the formation of international legal systems, or in epochal events such as the American and Russian Revolutions? How does the rise in contemporary piracy compare to its "golden age" forerunners? How can we discern the history of the “trackless” oceans, and how do we imagine their future now that "90% of everything" crosses an ocean, and the seas are variously described as rising or dying? Our focus in the course will be on writers listed above, but our approach will be radically interdisciplinary, so we will also watch a few films (by Jacques Cousteau, Gillo Pontecorvo and Allen Sekula), and we will read short excerpts from the disciplines of “critical theory” (Heller-Roazen, Foucault, Deleuze, Corbin), labor and economic history (Rediker, Fink, Levinson), and environmental thought (Carson, Alaimo).
COMP LIT 398 – Senior Seminar
This seminar is designed as a forum for the independent development and completion of a substantive scholarly paper in the field of Comparative Literature. The paper must involve either the study of literary texts from different literary traditions or the study of literature in relation to other media, other arts, or other disciplines. To this end, a number of short written assignments will be required, including an abstract, an annotated bibliography (using bibliographical software), and a formal project outline. The bulk of the coursework will comprise the senior paper itself (12-15 pages) and an oral presentation of the project to the class. The latter assignment will serve as a dress-rehearsal for the Senior CLS Colloquium, which will be held at the end of the quarter. The colloquium allows (and requires) all students to present their projects to the entire CLS community, including faculty and graduate students who will be in attendance.
COMP LIT 410 – Theories of Literature - Benjamin and Derrida
The seminar is designed to function as an advanced-level introduction to critical theory by investigating the relationship between Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, each of whom can be said to have “founded” one of its vibrant traditions. The seminar is divided into three parts. In the first, we will read
some of the early works of both Benjamin and Derrida, with particular attention to the way in which each of them, in his own way, seeks to radicalize and transform phenomenology—in part, by questioning the status of the cognizing subject and, in part, by asking what it would mean for language and literature to supersede mathematics and perception as the primary focal points of phenomenological inquiry. In the second section of the seminar, we will concentrate on their respective reassessments of the concept of origin, first by examining the relevant passages in the “Epistemo-Critical Preface” to Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play and then by reading Derrida’s account of the “trace” in the opening section of Of Grammatology and his similarly programmatic essay “Différance.” In the third section, we will turn toward Derrida’s reception of Benjamin, as we read their texts in tandem: Benjamin’s “Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” with the second chapter of Derrida’s Truth in Painting; Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” with Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel”: and finally, Benjamin’s “Toward the Critique of Violence- Force [Gewalt]” with Derrida’s Force of Law. No previous familiarity with Benjamin, Derrida, critical theory, or deconstruction is presupposed.
COMP LIT 411 – Critical Practices, “Deconstruction: Turn Toward the Absolute”
This seminar begins a series I have planned that will be devoted to examining the function of certain words in the writings of Derrida, including above all absolute, unconditional, aporia and responsibility. The main text to be read and discussed is the book, Given Time (in French: Donner le temps). It is a very strange and difficult text for many reasons, which probably explains why it has been largely ignored in the Derrida reception. But it is as Derrida himself writes, "a sort of intermediate stage, a moment of passage." From what to what is one of the questions we will be asking. The book goes back to lectures given in 1977-78, but was not published until 1991. It marks Derrida's turn toward the question of "responsibility," another word that will be examined closely. Finally, the book moves from a critical engagement with Marcel Mauss' Essay on the Gift, to Baudelaire's short prose piece, Counterfeit Money (La fausse monnaie). Derrida's essay may be regarded as a "gift" in both the English and the German sense of that word - and therefore demands the give-and-take of an intense engagement. The book comes out of a constant dialogue of Derrida with Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Freud and Lacan, all of whom will be considered during the course of the quarter.
COMP LIT 412 – Literary Studies Colloquium, “Forms of Life”
Even more than he does in his late books, Michel Foucault identifies the history of philosophy in his last two seminars at the College de France (1982-1984) with the invention of new ways of living and new forms of subjectivity. This course examines how, in these seminars, Foucault displaces the concept of truth from the domain of logos to that of life. We will focus in particular on Foucault's interrogation of two ideas: parrh?sia (or fearless speech) and forms of life. According to his analysis, the two notions are related to each other, as fearless speech reveals itself to have not only a political dimension but also an ethical one, which aims at transforming the subject's way of life through the exercise of courage. Foucault traces the argument of his seminars back to an array of Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman sources. Finally, although he does not make gender an overt central focus of his late thought, we will consider to what extent this category may be seen to play a crucial role in extending the practices of truth-telling and care of the self.
We will place Foucault's final seminars in dialogue with a selection of excerpts from ancient texts including Plato's Apology and Laches, Euripides's Ion, and Epictetus's Discourses as well as from contemporary works such as Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, Foucault's own The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Agamben's The Highest Poverty, and Sara Ahmed's Living a Feminist Life.
COMP_LIT 413 – Comparative Studies in Theme, “Romanticism: East and West”
Much scholarship has focused in recent decades on Romanticism and various forms of historicism, with Edward Said's influential concept of an "orientalizing" West dependent on an imagined Eastern Other at the fore. What do notions of empire, colonization, Orient and Occident look like from the vantage point of an expanding Eurasian empire (Russia) and a colonized nation at the juncture of Eastern and Western Europe (Poland)? What does Romanticism look like as it moves eastward to what Louis Phillipe, Comte de Segur, called, in 1779, "the Orient of Europe"? We will explore these and other questions chiefly through the work of three figures, George Lord Byron (1788-1824), Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), and Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837)
In the seminar we will read key texts from the vast secondary literature on Byron to examine recent AngloAmerican approaches to literary studies; to test their applicability to the very different literary traditions of Poland and Russia; and to challenge the critical and theoretical vocabulary in Slavic and Anglo-American Romantic scholarship alike.
We will also address key topoi in the Romantic movement generally (the Romantic hero, Romantic nature, Orientalism, nation, politics, prophecy) by way of works in multiple genres: lyric, drama, narrative poem, novel in verse.
All works will be available in translation. Slavic students will be expected to read Russian texts in the original. Polish texts will be available in the original and in both Russian and English translation. Questions of literary and cultural translation will form part of our discussion.
COMP LIT 413 – Comparative Studies in Theme, “Sacred and Profane: Studies in Medieval Cross-over”
Medievalists are in the habit of distinguishing sacred from secular texts, but some of the most vibrant and interesting cultural production lay on the borderline, in the terrain of "crossover." Courtly love lyrics could be indistinguishable from devotional poems to the Virgin, while motets interwove liturgical phrases with the melodies of popular songs. Bawdy fabliaux might return with tweaking as miracle stories. Bestiaries, originally a genre of moralized natural science, could be put to erotic or political use. The hybrid genre of hagiographic romance represents virgin martyrs as erotic heroines and the sorcerer Merlin as a parodic saint, while the Grail romances turn chivalry on its head to promote ascetic chastity and Eucharistic piety. What did medieval audiences make of such ambiguities? What textual markers enable us to distinguish
respectful homage from tongue-in-cheek parody, or audacious sacrilege from the sincerest form of flattery? In this seminar we will read medieval texts in a range of genres (lyric, romance, beast allegory, pseudohagiography, and mystical dialogue), exploring as many variants of crossover as our brief quarter permits. Middle English works will be read in the original, French texts in translation, but I am happy to offer tutoring in Old and Middle French for those who are proficient in the modern language.
COMP_LIT 414-0-20 – Comparative Studies in Genre, "Writing the Revolution"
Friedrich Schlegel famously claimed that the French Revolution, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and Fichte's Foundations of the Science of Knowledge represent the great trends of his age. Another term for this age is modernity. This class will follow Schlegel's intuition and reconstruct the precarious relationship between politics, philosophy, and literature which marks a specific notion of revolutionary modernity, i.e. the interruption of historical time in the name of something radically new and different. Paradigmatic for such a rupture is the French Revolution. Its literary representations and philosophical descriptions will be the topic of our discussions. A tentative reading list includes (but is not limited to): Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Holderlin, Friedrich Schiller, Heinrich von Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Georg Buchner, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt.
Although the class will focus mostly on the German tradition it is possible to include other texts, images, films, etc. depending on the particular interests and backgrounds of the participants.
COMP LIT 481-20 – Studies in Medieval Lit-The Troubadours & the Occitan Traditions
“Textuality in Transition”; Medieval literary theory can often seem strikingly modern and even postmodern in its concern with probing the nature of human language and its inherent limitations. For writers such as St. Augustine, the Occitan troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante Alighieri and the authors of the Roman de la Rose, writing is always an act of interpretation, one which confronts the essential indeterminacy of linguistic signs, both spoken and written. This anxiety reflects the unstable nature of medieval textual culture, as well as the fractured reality of spoken vernaculars dialects in contrast with the universal status of Latin as the language of literary and historical authority. In this class, we will study texts from a variety of genre (poetry, exegesis, romance) that interrogate the nature and function of language, from early medieval Biblical hermeneutics to the scholastic renaissance of the 12th century, the rise of vernacular literary cultures in the 13th and 14th century, and the textual revolution brought about by printing in the 15th century. How might medieval texts from this period of rapid cultural and technological change speak to our own current shifting media landscape? Classwork will include close examination of medieval manuscripts. Reading knowledge of French is required.
COMP LIT 481-21 – Affective Passages: Theories & Histories of Emotion
What is “affect theory”? What is “the history of emotions”? This course charts seminal critical theoretical approaches to literary and cultural analysis through the lens of emotion and affect theory. Beginning with post-Freudian psychoanalysis, the class considers how (or even if) subjectivity and attachment are staged in theory, literature, and film. Is affect merely an expression of contained, individual inner states? How do emotions form and mediate the subject’s relationship to the world? In response to questions such as these, the class will consider connections between emotion and politics and the ways in which this relationship is staged in different media from emotions-on-the-couch to post cinematic affect
COMP LIT 481-22 – Russian Formalism in Theory and Practice
This seminar will examine the school and doctrine of Russian Formalism, which influenced and informed many developments in the XX century literary and art theory, from Prague Linguistic circle through Structuralism and Semiotics. Along with the detailed study of the critical and theoretical essays by such adherents of Formalism as Victor Shklovsky, Roman Jacobson, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eikhenbaum, et al., we will be exploring the major works of Russian modernism and avant-garde in literature and film through the methodological approach of Formalist theory. Special focus on the issues of Formalism and Marxism, Formalism and History, and the interconnections between culture and politics of the time.
COMP LIT 481 – Studies in Literary Theory, “Historicism: Uses and Abuses”
This course adapts its title from Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" ("On the Use and Abuse of History for Life," 1874). Beginning with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about historical materialism and the uses of history and literary history as disciplines (Michelet, Taine, Croce, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Mariátegui, Benjamin and Adorno), we will go on to survey the development and invocations of historicism, new historicism, and post-historicism as approaches to literary study across early modern, romantic, victorian, modern and postcolonial literatures. How does historicism fare in addressing diverse periods? For example, while early modern and Victorian studies have recently seen minor insurgencies against dominant tendencies toward "positivist historicism," some of the most energizing recent work in twentieth-century literary studies has been deeply historicist in inclination. Must we continue to follow Jameson's famous injunction to "always historicize!," or do we rather find ourselves in a "weak" theoretical state of affairs by which "we cannot not historicize?" How do we understand Roland Barthes's claim that "a little formalism turns one away from History, but ? a lot brings one back to it"? What is historicism good for? What are its varieties? Where does it fall short?
COMP_LIT 481 – Studies in Literary Theory, “Visual Culture and Media”
The aim of this course is to introduce graduate students to twentieth-century theories of visual culture, sound, and media, with special emphasis on the French and German contexts. Rather than
attempting to cover all positions and directions, we will work around specific questions and trace the ways in which they have been pursued by theorists and practitioners alike. How can we conceptualize the relation between art and technology? Can we speak of perception and memory independently of specific technical apparatuses? What is at stake in the shift from analog to digital media at the level of both inscription and reception? As we consider different kinds of media, we will read texts by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler, among others. We will also analyze films by Martin Arnold, Guy Debord, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, and Alain Resnais.
COMP_LIT 486 – Studies in Lit and its Disciplines, "Indian Ocean Epistemologies"
With the dominance of the Atlantic as a model for the study ofcultural exchanges between continents, the Indian Ocean is often excluded from critical theory discussions despite its centrality in the circulations of various philosophical traditions in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. This course will use literary and philosophical texts from and about the Indian Ocean to comparatively examine how intellectuals and artists have viewed the world using scripts and terms different from those developed in the West. It is out of convenience that we use epistemology as an entry point toward a comprehensive engagement with Indian Ocean critical theory; much of the philosophical debates from the region (e.g., work by Mbiti, Nyerere, Tempel, Masolo) are on epistemological issues. However, a transdisciplinary reading of each text will engage with various perceptions of the critical practice the Global South, including the interface of aesthetics and activism. Taking Indian Ocean theories of knowledge as multiple because of their diverse sources and cross-cultural interactions for centuries, the course will be interested in unearthing the splintering differences among the philosophers and the changes over time in what might beconsidered a single school of thought. We read works by such thinkers as Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Valentin Mudimbe, Sugata Bose, Sharifa Ahjum,and Achille Mbembe, especially in relation to their critiques or repurposing of western epistemologies. Indian Ocean philosophical traditions to be compared with western ones (and with one another) include Sufism, Negritude, Creolite, Transmodernism, Coolitude, and Ubuntu.
COMP_LIT 486 – Studies in Lit and its Disciplines, "Writing & History: Religion, Gender, Politics"
This interdisciplinary seminar examines the history of writing from a wide variety of perspectives, with particular attention to the implications of different writing systems in the determination of religious practices and gender roles as well political and economic orders. The seminar will begin with a review of recent work on the history of writing, which locates some of the first earliest forms in the systems of debt and finance that made possible large-scale, geographically diverse political orders. The seminar will then turn toward a reflection on the consequences of the invention of printing technologies, which made it possible for nations to see themselves as collective ?families,' thus producing the conditions for the emergence of nationalist ideologies. Writing systems are also deeply implicated in theological programs and religious practices. Monotheism is closely connected with the advent of Semitic abjads (consonant alphabets), which, among other effects, fosters abstract conceptualization. The seminar will similarly investigate the ways in which differences between Judaism and Christianity are related to the differences in the written embodiments of their respective holy books. Throughout the seminar, we will consider the gendered character of the opposition between writing and orality, where the former is generally associated with masculinity, the latter with femininity. Gender roles have created specific genealogies based on a paternal line; until the development of genetic fingerprinting, written records formed the ultimate basis of patrilineal descent. Among the topics under discussion in this segment of the seminar is the exceptional matrilineal character of descent in Jewish law, for, as a consequence of the Diaspora, the body of the mother replaced the homeland, complementing the ?portative homeland' of the Torah. The seminar will conclude by investigating how contemporary society?with its reliance on digital writing systems?has become a network of signs encoding our very lives.
All readings and discussions will be in English
The course will be taught by Professor Christina von Braun. Professor von Braun is the 2018 Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor of German. A renowned scholar in the fields of Gender Studies and Media Theory, she is a recent recipient of the Sigmund-Freud Culture Prize and held for many years a chair in the Institute for the History and Theory of Culture at the Humboldt University, Berlin.
COMP LIT 487 – The Global Avant-Garde
This seminar offers an introduction to the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Our survey includes canonical European avant-gardes and their international circulation, but also a range of non-European movements: Futurism in Italy and Russia; Berlin Dada; Stridentism in Mexico; Surrealism in France, Japan, and Egypt; Brazilian Anthropofagism; and Négritude. Our focus will be on manifestos, literary works, and critical theories of the avant-garde, but we will also consider the visual arts, with a planned group trip to the Art Institute of Chicago.
COMP_LIT 487 – Studies in Lit and the Arts, "Post-fascist Aesthetics"
This course explores cultural and aesthetic responses to fascism in the wake of World War II. With a focus on Japan, and reference to the German and Italian contexts, we consider the uneasy relationship between fascist aesthetics and aesthetic critiques of fascism in the postwar era. We begin by examining how writers, filmmakers, and other artists in the immediate aftermath of the war produced moralizing narratives about the evils of fascism. We then turn to critiques that claimed such narratives reinforced the binary logic of fascist ideologies and challenged the totalizing tendencies of all moral discourses. These critiques lead us to a set of questions about "post-fascist aesthetics:" How did the cultural politics of fascism shape the range of aesthetic responses to it and forms of authority in the postwar era? How might works of literature and film illuminate the breaks and continuities between fascism and postwar political regimes? What images, rhetorical styles, and aesthetic techniques were used within and across various cultural contexts in responding to the aesthetics of fascism? Throughout the course we will consider the implications of the term "post-fascist" and how it has been used to define cultural and political movements since the war. All material will be available in English translation.
COMP_LIT 488 – Special Topics in Comparative Literature, "Fictions and Frictions to Power"
The exercise of various modes of power: social, political, erotic, dialogic. How has resistance to power been imagined and carried out?
COMP_LIT 488 – Special Topics in Comparative Literature, "Toward a Decolonial Critical Theory"
This course will be taught by the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor, Rocio Zambrana.
This course will consider key texts in Frankfurt School Critical Theory alongside Decolonial Thought and Decolonial Feminism. Discussions will consider conception of critique at work in these texts in order to construct a decolonial critical theory of society. Readings will include texts by Gyorgy Lukacs, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Anibal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Maria Lugones, Yuderkis Espinosa-Minoso, and Gloria Anzaldua.
COMP LIT 488 – Writing Absences (taught in French)
This course traces the writing of absence in select works of fiction by writers from various parts of Francophone Africa. While the writing of absence is a dominant political and historical theme in contemporary literatures of migration, exile, and war, we will frame the question much more broadly in order to attend to absence as a constitutive dimension of literary writing. In this sense, the writing of absence may also imply absence as writing. In order to begin thinking the possibilities that the relationship between these two elements suggest, we will make brief excursions into theoretical works that may help frame the question for us in a preliminary fashion.
A thinker who has suggestively elaborated the relationship between absence and writing in his own work is Maurice Blanchot. We will therefore begin the first segment of our course with selections from Blanchot’s work so that we can glimpse some of the stakes of this mode of reading and questioning. We will then move to theoretical and literary works by writers from the African continent written in French and try to tease out the ways in which these diverse approaches to literary writing might think absence in relation to writing.
Given Blanchot’s own mode of writing where the literary and the theoretical are often not distinguishable, we will not prioritize the theoretical over the literary. Rather we will read them in conversation with each other allowing them to interact by confirming and/or challenging each other’s stakes. This course is designed to accompany the Department of French and Italian’s Fall Colloquium focused on Maurice Blanchot entitled “Maurice Blanchot: Thought of Absence,” which will take place on Friday November 3rd, 2017.